Well, if you've been a regular reader of this blog, you'll probably remember one of my "Big Strategies" around all of this, e.g. let's get good at social media behaviors and skills "behind the firewall", and then -- when we venture outside the firewall -- we'll know what the hell we're doing out there.

That time is upon us, and some of the debates around this are interesting.

But, given our internal experience, I think we're well advantaged about how to think about the problem.

March 14, 2008

At the recent Jive meeting, we had two clearly delineated groups there -- people who were focused on outside communities, and people who were focused on insider communities.

IF you just sat and listened to how the two groups were using the product, what they wanted, etc. you might come away with the impression that there were two distinct use cases with not much commonality.

But, as the meeting progressed, I think these two groups will have more in common over time.

February 28, 2008

As I keep you apprised of our journey here, I want to point out unique, special -- and sometimes surprising -- things that are happening on our internal platform.

Our internal platform, EMC|ONE has been up since last September. We're at 3,000 registered, named and participating users, and a much larger number of lurkers who've shown up to look around -- often repeatedly.

And we don't need to sell this thing internally anymore. Our users are doing it for us.

February 20, 2008

Well, I mentioned a few posts ago that my blog had been "discovered" by the E2.0 crowd.

One of the more interesting side effects was that many of my thoughts were pulled apart, analyzed and dissected by some pretty smart people.

I withstood the blog-based proctology examination and still retained most of my dignity, but one interesting thread that intrigued me was the focus on the "conversational collaboration" model we had embraced.

Leave it to other people to tell you what you were really doing, but -- heck -- they were right.

February 01, 2008

I promised you I'd share all the major twists and turns of our journey here, and we're coming through an interesting interaction between other projects, specific requirements, and corporate interplay.

Setting up the story will take a while, but the outcome is good (I think), and I'm guessing that this sort of issue will frequently pop up in larger enterprises that are considering social media platforms.

January 17, 2008

I'd like to say we had a well-defined plan to move from prototype to pilot to early adopters to mainstream, but -- like all things web 2.0-ish -- things happen at their own pace, and -- occasionally -- in ways that you don't expect.

This week, I think we made a phase transition from "interesting project" to "corporate legit".

January 09, 2008

I believe that the ultimate value of social media revolves around a central idea: communities. Groups of like-minded people sharing information and collaborating in unstructured ways. For me, that's the mother lode, the jackpot, the singular goal.

When we talk about our social media initiatives, I've brainwashed everyone to talk in terms of communities: community identification, formation, growth, development, management, leverage, etc.

And we're starting to see some proposals for some pretty big and hairy communities start to form.

January 04, 2008

I've written before how I believe that social media success has everything to do with new behaviors, skills, roles, etc. -- it's not so much about the platform and technology (although you DO need a place to do this), it's more about how you use it.

And -- like all behaviors -- we've noticed a certain reticence in the masses to adopt many of these new behaviors.

Sure, we have our early (and vocal) adopters. But for every one of those, there are literally hundreds who are watching, and not participating.

January 03, 2008

One of the things I try to do here is to capture the interesting debates we have over guiding principles associated with our Social Media effort, expose you to the thinking, and recap what we did and why.

My only hope is that you'll get some value from the discussions you're likely to enter into, and might be a bit forewarned as to the various tradeoffs.

We've just crossed the threshold on this discussion, so here's what happened.